Naturalists who write for a popular audience have a tough needle to thread. An acceptable work of popular naturalism provides readers with enough detailed research to convey and legitimize the author’s expertise, while simultaneously eschewing esoteric tangents and academic quibbles. A great work will also contain responsible speculation about the borders of human knowledge––just enough […]
Having now read more than 1,000 pages of Alice’s Munro’s prose, it is clear to me that she is a once-in-a-generation kind of talent. This woman appears to produce beautiful phrases with the readiness and ease with which average humans produce carbon dioxide. Her fictional examinations of the human condition are simultaneously plainspoken and impenetrable; […]
“Who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin Fighting for a system built to fail Spooning water from their broken vessels As far as I can see there is no land” So sings Ben Knox Miller in The Low Anthem’s “Charlie Darwin,” one of the best songs I discovered during my college years. The track […]
Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams is nothing short of a masterpiece––the perfect book to save me from of a recent string of novels that didn’t cut the mustard. A befitting analysis would require a high degree of literary scrutiny, something I am probably too many years removed from my college days to muster. But I will trot out what […]
Tom Toner contacted me in search of an honest review of this book, and when I agreed to give it a shot, his publisher sent me two hard copies (one for me and another for a friend). Given Toner’s enthusiasm and generosity, I truly wish I had enjoyed his book more than I did. Despite some […]
Why Nations Fail has been weighing down my bookshelf for a few years now, but the recent election of Donald Trump sent me scurrying to dust it off. First published in 2012 by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, this treatise on the differences between successful and unsuccessful nations feels newly relevant and frighteningly intimate. Looking abroad […]
I’m one of those people who thinks Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the apotheosis of English literature. I’ve never encountered another text that can move me so profoundly, entertain me so thoroughly, or describe the human condition with commensurate depth and clarity. I consider Hamlet to be a once-in-a-civilization––perhaps even a once-in-a-species––creation. So, in one way, I am the perfect […]
I am getting married in two weeks, and my officiant––who is also a dear friend and fellow book-lover––recommended Milton Mayeroff’s On Caring as an aid for writing my wedding vows. I can’t imagine a better text for helping someone approach the joyful yet intimidating project of marriage. This isn’t just one of the best books […]
Having now read almost all of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, I can safely say that they should be required reading for all humans. Was Banks the smartest or most creative science fiction writer of all time? Definitely not. Was his grasp of science and futurism vastly superior to that of his many talented contemporaries? […]
“I don’t know what the right thing to do is; I sometimes think I know too much, I’ve studied too much, learned too much, remembered too much. It all seems to average out, somehow; like dust that settles over…whatever machinery we carry inside us that leads us to act, and puts the same weight everywhere, […]